Fast and Robust Differential Relative Pose Estimation With Radial Distortion

In this letter, we address the differential two-view geometry problem of estimating the relative pose between two consecutive frames in the presence of radial distortion. This problem is of both theoretical and practical interests and has not been solved. We derive its parameterization and present an effective and robust generalized eigenvalue solver based on the hidden variable technique. Furthermore, we propose a nonlinear refinement scheme within the maximum likelihood criterion to produce more accurate estimates of the relative pose and radial distortion. Compared with the standard differential solutions without modeling the radial distortion, our approach can recover more geometrically correct point correspondences for a pair of radially distorted images. Moreover, our differential solution runs an order of magnitude faster than the discrete solution in terms of recovering the full camera motion. Experiment results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and method in dealing with the radial distortion.